2nd Samuel Chapter 7 verse 14 Holy Bible

Pulpit Commentary

Pulpit CommentaryVerse 14. - I will be his Father, and he shall be my son. Between father and son there is not only love, but oneness. Whatsoever the father hath, that belongs also to the son by natural right. But this sonship is magnified in the Psalms beyond the measure of Solomon or any natural limits. The Son there is "the Firstborn," which Solomon was not, "higher than the kings of the earth" (Psalm 89:27); and he must have "the nations for his inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for his possession" (Psalm 2:8). Psalms like the second and seventy-second belong, not to Solomon personally, but to him as the type of the prince of Peace; and they help to show us what is the true meaning and fulfilment of the words here. The rod of men; that is, such punishment as men fitly receive for their faults. David's natural posterity was to be exempt neither from human depravity, nor from punishment, nor from the changes and chances of mortal life. With them, as with men generally, there would be a tangled skein, of virtue and sin, of folly and wisdom, of terrible fall and penitent recovery. But there was to be no blotting out of David's lineage. Great earthly houses, in the long course of events, one after another become extinct, and even the tabernacle of David was to fall (Amos 9:11), but not forever. God would "raise up its ruins' in Christ, and "build it as in the days of old." So in Isaiah 9:1 there is the same thought of the complete down-hewing of David's earthly lineage, yet only to rise again to nobler life and vigour, in the Branch, or Sucker, that was to spring from the fallen trunk.

Ellicott's Commentary

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(14) If he commit iniquity.--The promise has plainly in view a human successor or successors of David upon his throne; and yet it also promises the establishment of David's kingdom FOREVER by an emphatic threefold repetition (2Samuel 7:13; 2Samuel 7:16), which can only be fulfilled, and has always been understood as to be fulfilled, in the Messiah. There is a similar promise of a prophet, human and yet more than human, in Deuteronomy 18:15-22, and the explanation in both cases is the same. The Divine word looks forward to a long succession of human prophets or heads of the theocracy who should for the time being, and as far as might be, fill the place of the true Prophet and King, all culminating at last in Him who should fully make known the Father's will and reign over His people, of "whose kingdom there shall be no end." (Luke 1:32-33).